First post, by Sleaka_J
- Rank
- Newbie
I have a couple of Retro PCs. The one I'm asking about today has the following specs:
Intel Pentium III 1Ghz
Intel CA810E Motherboard
512Mb SDRAM
Voodoo 3 2000 PCI
Ensoniq AudioPCI 2000
Startech 7port USB 2.0 PCI card - The front USB 2.0 ports on the case are connected to the 9pin header on the card
Western Digital Raptor 10K RPM 150GB HDD - I had it spare at the time
Gotek FDD emulator
Asus DVD Optical Drive
Triple boot system - DOS 6.22 & Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Windows 98SE and Windows 2000
Now I know the motherboard chipset isn't the best, but when I was originally looking for a motherboard, I was replacing a system that died and it had an i815 chipset so I was reasonably familiar with the series. I wanted a Socket 370 (already had the CPU and Fan), MicroATX (already had the case) and I mistakenly believed the onboard sound (a Creative variant) had proper Windows 3.1 drivers and so I bought it. It's not "bad", but I haven't found anything that could replace it. The motherboard already has the highest CPU it can take and the highest amount of RAM it will support. It has 4 PCI slots.
Since the motherboard only has PCI, originally, I had a 2Mb Matrox Mystique in the system (great Windows 3.1 drivers) and the plan was to get a Voodoo 2 for 3D acceleration in the other Windows. I found the 2MB limiting in Windows 2000 as I couldn't set the higher resolution with higher colour depth that I wanted. I still had a working TNT2 M64 PCI from the dead system so I tried that and found the Windows 3.1 drivers to be terrible. I did a little searching and found the Voodoo 3 has some good Windows 3.x drivers. I ended up finding a half decent price on a Voodoo 3 replacing the Matrox and negating the Voodoo 2 plan. It has a fan on it which takes up the space over the second PCI slot below it. There's no point getting an AGP card or motherboard now.
The sound chip on the motherboard turned out to have very poor Win3.x drivers. It would play WAV files, but Midi wouldn't work at all. So I needed to find a PCI sound card that works in 3.1/98/2K. There aren't many that fit the bill, but I found the AudioPCI and it just works in all 3 operating systems. This is not my main Retro PC as I also have an XP machine with EAX that I do most of my Retro gaming on, so there's no point to a new sound card and I don't have a spare PCI slot to put a second one in anyway.
I got USB2.0 working in 98 and 2K using the Startech card. Yeah, it's a VIA based card (I know the NEC cards are preferred here), but I needed one that had a 9pin USB header since the motherboard didn't have it and it's the only one I could find. It worked really well out of the box. The motherboard only has 2 USB 1.1 ports and now I have 6 USB2.0 ports I can use (2 on the front, 4 on the back).
Other than the HDD which I could replace with a variety of things (I haven't made up my mind what to do there), I can't think of anything else I could upgrade on this system.
Do anybody have ideas? Is there something I've missed maybe?